Auckland’s Anniversary Day Regatta is held every year on the Monday closest to January 29, the legacy of an impromptu “regatta” between the whaleboats and gigs of Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson’s retinue on the day the city was founded, September 18, 1840. Since 1850, it has been cancelled on only one occasion, and has taken a place at the core of Auckland’s sporting culture.

Magazine

Mar - Apr 2012

Longlining and trawling kill tens of thousands of seabirds each year in the Southern Ocean. The birds seize baited hooks that trail kilometres behind boats, are caught and drown, collide with cables, or entangled in nets. However, it is also possible that the cast-offs from the vessels represent a plentiful source of food that is advantageous to the birds overall.
Researchers have turned to the albatrosses themselves to clarify the relationship between the birds and the boats, especially during their 10-month, biannual breeding season.
Otago University PhD student Junichi Sugishita secured solar-powered GPS units to the backs of nesting northern royal albatrosses at Dunedin’s Taiaroa Head, and temperature loggers to their legs. The loggers on some of the birds will relay data back through cellphone networks to be plotted live on a Google satellite map with position data of fishing boats.
When birds and boats coincide, Sugishita will watch for rapid temperature drops that indicate when an albatross is feeding on the water. (Albatrosses cannot feed on the wing.) He hopes that the data will indicate whether the birds are actively targeting the baited hooks surrounding the boats themselves, or just following the vessels.
When not nesting, royal albatrosses forage as far afield as the coasts of Chile and Argentina for fish, squid, krill and salps, but their feeding patterns during the ten-month breeding season around Dunedin remains a mystery. Sugishita hopes that the transmitters will stay on the birds for nine months, so time will tell.

Wetlands conserve biodiversity, store carbon, control erosion, purify water and function as breeding grounds for fish, fowl and invertebrates. In New Zealand, 90 per cent of wetlands have been degraded, drained or destroyed. Many of those are now being restored to their former glory, but new research suggests that they will never function as they once did.
University of California, Berkeley fellow David Moreno-Mateos studied 651 restored wetlands of every type around the world­ from salty estuaries to alpine marshes—50 years to a century after restoration. Despite this long period, they were found to store 23 per cent less carbon than unaltered sites, and had 26 per cent lower plant biodiversity.

In november 1861, just over 150 years ago, a small committee was brought to order in Auckland, expressly devoted to “the introduc­tion, acclimatisation and domestication of all innoxuous [sic] animals, birds, fishes, insects, and vegetables whether useful or ornamental.”
So began the official corruption of the New Zealand ecosystem. But in truth, the informal introductions had begun much earlier. Maori brought a menagerie aboard waka and Europeans had been introducing pests, game animals and stock for a century—not all of them “innoxuous”.
Now, the litany of species that have no good place here could barely be printed in the pages of this magazine. We’ve come a long way, but it may be time we thought about finding our way back.
Last month, 19 conservationists from DOC, Forest & Bird, Landcare Research, the Animal Health Board and a number of academic institutions took leave of their jobs and travelled to a small lodge on the Central Plateau. There, beneath the looming presence of Ruapehu, they embarked on a two-day thought experiment behind closed doors to consider an idea so original that all were asked at the outset of the meeting to “suspend their disbelief”.
They concentrated their cumulative expertise on a single notion, the idea of a predator-free New Zealand.
“The paradigm for every ecologist in New Zealand has always been to do nothing, to control in perpetuity, or to eradicate,” says Nicola Toki of Forest & Bird. “But to do nothing has never been an option. And eradi­cation has always been considered out of the question. But how far out of the question?”
To entertain the idea of New Zealand without the most harmful predators­ rodents, mustelids and possums—was barely plausible, and the group scarcely considered how to fund the enterprise. But they did find fewer obstacles than they had expected; it would be technically possible, the experts concluded, using existing techniques and existing technology, to rid the mainland of the vermin that have, acre by acre, eroded the fauna and flora of Aotearoa.
It would take a lifetime, but then, maybe only one lifetime.
There were no minutes, there was no outcome, but after two days they had mapped out a pathway and a destination, a way to unwind centuries of misunder­standing, a route back to a more primal ecology.
Wrongs can be righted, and the native species with which we adorn our T-shirts and fridge magnets may one day populate our forests and backyards, just as they now inhabit offshore island sanctuaries. If the motifs of popular culture are anything to go by, we care deeply about these things. The question is, do we care enough?

One hundred and fifty years ago, acclimatisation societies forever changed the nature of our nature, introducing exotic creatures for commerce, sport and sentiment. Today, their successor, Fish & Game, finds itself in a very different role...

Te Araroa trust has just opened the Kerikeri track as a significant extension to the existing 3.5-km DOC Kerikeri River Track. Trampers who use the track simply as a day-walk from Kerikeri can now double that distance, 7 km through to SH10. More ambitious day-walkers can venture another 5 km on to Maungaparerua (241 m) and a wide outlook over the Bay of Islands.
The new track is part of the 200-km ‘Ocean to Ocean’ Te Araroa section, Ahipara to Kerikeri. Te Araroa through-walkers will come onto the track from the north-western end at Puketi Forest HQ, then follow Waiare Road for 1.5 km, before crossing onto Landcorp’s Puketotara Farm. Expect some attention from the farm’s curious heifers. The track then breaks out onto Mangakaretu Road before re-entering the Landcorp farm, sidling around Maungaparerua and dropping steeply down to Maungaparerua Stream. The track crosses private farmland as it follows the stream to the Kerikeri River. It then follows the river down­stream on the true right, crossing on a new swingbridge, then ducking under the SH10 highway bridge to continue following the river on the true left through totara groves to a DOC viewing platform at Rainbow Falls. The pre­existing DOC track then leads through bush and past an old hydro-electric plant, 3.5 km to Kerikeri Basin Recreation Reserve, Kemp House and the Old Stone Store.

Fabric rationing during World War II meant that scores of brides wore dresses that were far from the extravagant wedding garments they may have dreamed of­ unless they had a parachute.
Carol Gifford from Taranaki was presented with a silk chute brought home by her groom, returned serviceman Owen Thomas, who had been posted in the Pacific. While the real prize was up to 65 sqm of silk free of rationing restrictions, the parachutes also featured cords for ruching and panels of zigzag seams.
During wartime, bridal garments were typically a simple suit or one’s best dress. Supplies of silk had dwindled when the main supplier of the time, Japan, became allied with Germany and Italy, and silk supplies already in circulation were diverted to parachute manufacture. Unless the bride was donated extra rationing coupons, the amount of fabric available would service only minimalist tastes—the trailing skirt with embroidered bodice on Gifford’s dress would have been a lavish addition.
The dress was never worn again after the wedding ceremony on August 8, 1946, at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in New Plymouth. However, the sleeves were later removed and the silk used for the family’s christening dresses.

They are among the most out-sized, extreme animals ever to have lived. They are also among the most socially interactive and ruthlessly exploited. For all their size and might, sperm whales’ continued presence in the oceans remains contingent on the actions of their resource-hungry nemesis: us.

Nile Street looked much like its Egyptian namesake as rain thundered down on Nelson in December. Culverts choked with rocks and silt, and despite extensive use of sandbags, houses and gardens were inundated. But worse was to come. Hillsides collapsed, rivers burst their banks and torrents of water drove tonnes of silt and sand through valleys and farmland throughout the district. After two days of deluge, those who weren’t driven from their homes by the rising flood looked in disbelief upon the damage wrought by water in one of New Zealand’s sunniest regions.

Treading water, Gareth Cooke battled a sweeping tide to focus on a classic yacht slicing through the Waitemata to round a harbour mark.
The water work was just another day for Cooke, as he and fellow photographer Jason Hosking attempted to capture the action on the water during this year’s Auckland Anniver­sary Day Regatta. A third photographer, Ivor Wilkins, was shooting from the vantage point of a helicopter.
“It was about Auckland being Auckland, the City of Sails,” says Cooke. “So we jumped in a boat and went out.”
The seven-hour shoot was logistically challenging for the pair on the water. Cooke and Hosking beetled around the harbour in a rigid inflatable boat to capture the chaos, and often had to be in two places at once—the racing stretched from the Harbour Bridge to Mission Bay, and well into the Hauraki Gulf.
Cooke’s photos of the event range from close-ups of maritime details, to beaming faces enjoying the salt spray, many images shot using a stabilised 500mm lens. As a tripod is all but useless in a boat, he had to balance the heavy lens in his hands and use a fast shutter speed to compensate. And when the opportunity afforded itself, he jumped in with an underwater housing to capture an alternative perspective.
Cooke knows a thing or two about sailing. In 1998, he packed in an office job editing the boating magazine Sea Spray to spend eight years as a professional sailor. He lived a tran­sient lifestyle overseas, working for Califor­nian billionaires and ex-convict boat owners, in between circumnavigating the world twice in the Volvo Ocean Race.
“The Volvo race is the peak of the moun­tain, really,” he says. “On a professional level, that’s as high as you can get.”
As the migratory career lost its appeal, Cooke decided photography was a natural step given his editorial and sailing experience. “It was the combination of two passions. Photography was a way to settle down again.”
He returned to New Zealand to start a business offering marine and commercial photography, striving to convey in an image the kind of attraction he feels to the sport, to transport the viewer to that time and place for a few seconds.
“Taking photographs is like telling a story in one moment,” says Cooke, “and if you can do that, I think you’ve succeeded.”

The sun powers our planet and provides us life. It’s as simple as that—though the processes can be mysterious and the applications surprising. In December last year, a bunch of Kiwis with a budget of less than $40,000 proved that it was possible to drive the length of the country using nothing but sunlight.